Authorship Still Not Used for Ranking, According to Google

Taking a trip back down memory lane readers will remember when Google’s John Mueller told us that Google Authorships don’t affect rankings. Fast forward to present day, and not much has changed.

In a Google Webmasters help thread yesterday Mueller went on to confirm what many bloggers have refused to accept (myself included). Here is what Mueller had to say:

“…authorship only plays a role with the ‘in-depth-articles’ feature, and otherwise has no effect on ranking in web-search at all. I think it’s a great thing to set up, but I wouldn’t assume that it has any effect on normal rankings at all. We use over 200 factors in our crawling, indexing, and ranking, and we regularly make changes to our algorithms, so there are many potential reasons why a site might go up or down in rankings.”

A lot of SEO bloggers may have gotten caught up in the statements made by Matt Cutts back in March when he explained that authorship is used for in-depth articles. Unfortunately, anything outside of that scope isn’t affected.

That doesn’t mean that it won’t play a role in the future, especially with Google’s non-too-subtle push for its own social platform Google Plus to climb the ranks. It has also been found that authorship rich-snippets can improve click-through rates. I, for one, always urge my clients to retrieve their authorship status for the off-chance things change and it becomes important. It’s never too early to master a Google feature, especially in a competitive ranking climate. But, for now authorship will most likely work as a way to further engage your intended audience and for the use of in-depth articles.